“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.

Hottest ever June? Jury’s still out

July 24, 2016

By Paul Homewood

Booker is on the case of the hottest evah claims today:

Hottest ever June? Jury’s still out

It was scarcely surprising that the BBC, led by its arch-global warming zealot Roger Harrabin, should have used last week’s mini-heat wave to trumpet that “last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide, and the fourteenth straight month that global heat records were broken”. This claim came from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one of the world’s chief interlinked sources of data on global surface temperatures.

But what might also have been pointed out was that in recent years claims like this have, for two reasons, become increasingly controversial. For a start, as I have reported many times before, those responsible for compiling these records of global surface temperatures, including NOAA, have come under expert questioning for the way thay have long been engaging in wholesale “adjustment” of their data, almost invariably in the same direction. For earlier years, back to the 1930s and 1940s, their temperature figures have been revised downwards, while those for recent years have regularly been “adjusted” upwards – thus conveying that the world has been heating up much more than was justified by the original recorded data.

It was long universally accepted, for instance, that the hottest year since modern records began was 1998. This coincided with a record El Nino, the warm phase of the Pacific ocean current which raises temperatures all over the world, But since all this “adjusting” began, 1998 has slid down the list, so that it is now shown as having been exceeded by several subsequent El Nino years, culminating in a rise so dramatic that 1998 is now dwarfed by the figures coinciding with the latest El Nino, claiming 2016 to be the new ”hottest year in history”.

But what also gets tellingly ignored by the BBC and others is that, since 1998, there has been an increasingly glaring divergence between the global temperatures shown by these surface records and the much more comprehensive temperature measurements made by US satellites. These clearly show 1998 as having been still easily the hottest year on record: more than 0.2 degrees C warmer than 2016. But the satellites have also lately been showing temperatures again dropping sharply, as happens each time an El Nino reverses into a La Nina. This suggests that these dramatic fluctuations have nothing to do with human activity but arise naturally.

Several websites on both sides of the Atlantic have long been meticulously analysing all this; and in vain have asked the various bodies responsible for the surface records for a proper explanation as to why their figures need to be constantly “adjusted” in this way, and why they have thus come to differ so markedly from the findings of the satellites.

Unless these questions can be resolved, there is more than enough evidence to suggest that we should take any claim that 2016 is “the hottest year on record” with several hefty bags of salt.

Below is what the CFSR/CFSV2 estimates from UM CCI show for June global temperature in degrees Celsius. June 2016 ranks 4th for estimates going back to 1979, although my best guess is that the uncertainties for estimating a global surface temperature are on the order of 0.3C to 0.5C in recent years and much larger prior to the satellite era. So in reality any of these top ten years could be the “hottest” (if you consider 16C hot) because of the uncertainty and we can’t really tell which one was.

The June 2016 estimate from UM CCI is preliminary and based on an average of all of the final daily averages posted. They have not yet posted a final monthly average, although WeatherBELL shows a final June 2016 CFSV2 average of 16.34C which is very close.

The CFSV2 estimates are showing a bit of an uptick in the global temperature anomaly estimate for July so far. The current WeatherBELL estimate through July 23rd is at 0.38C compared to June at 0.27C.

To be fair, Ole Humlum’s site http://www.climate4you.com (which the alarmists tend to denigrate) shows that UAH, RSS, HadCRUT4, NASA GISS and NOAA NCEI (formerly NCDC) all show highest ever temperatures caused by the 2015-16 El Nino. We will have to wait and see where the temperatures stabilise following the El Nino and possible La Nina. All the global temperatures series showed higher temperatures after the 1997-98 El Nino than before.